


Queering the Canon: Titanic

by katekane



Category: Titanic (1997)
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, F/F, Femslash, Genderswap, POV Female Character, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Sexism, female_Jack, queering the canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 12:15:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14592822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katekane/pseuds/katekane
Summary: What do you get if you take one of the most heteronormative blockbusters of all times and genderswap one of the main characters? In the case of Titanic I think what you get is a lot less cliché and a lot more interesting.To upper-class Rose, Titanic is anything but the ship of dreams. It is transporting her to a life and a marriage she does not want. Then she meets Jack - a butch artist who proves that women can choose alternative paths even in 1912.





	1. I - Distant Memories

**Author's Note:**

> I am using the original movie script as my source of inspiration, including its anacronisms (I am aware that in 1912 Freud had not yet written one word about men's preoccupation with size - but the Titanic writers were clearly not...).

**I - Distant Memories**

It's been 84 years... and I can still smell the fresh paint. Titanic was called ‘the Ship of Dreams’. And it really was. It was to everyone else. To me, it was a slave ship, taking me back to America to enter a marriage arranged by my mother and husband-to-be. I had the title, the Edwardian upbringing, and the innocence of a 17-year-old. Cal had the fortune that would make up for the foolishness of my dead father. My mother would never have to turn to sewing, but could live out her old age in the luxury befitting her class. My freedom was the necessary sacrifice; one expected to be readily given by a well-behaved young woman such as myself.

Except, I was not quite as well behaved as my mother or fiancé wanted me to be. Perhaps because their standards were impossibly high. Perhaps because the seeds of my rebellion to come were already implanted in me, a part of who I was all along. I will never know for sure, but I do know that I was to blame for us being late that April morning so many years ago. I had dressed in black. I felt like black. Well, truth be told, I had no idea what I really felt like back then. I knew what I _did not_ feel like: confining corsets, impractical ball gowns, and grotesque feathered hats. ‘Black’ was the closest thing to an alternative my limited imagination could conjure. Cal had forced me to change, of course, and so when we finally arrived at the dock I felt as big and pompous as the ship itself. The comparison was yet another reason for me to hate it. I tried to conceal my despair with cool disdain. This always worked with Cal; he understood arrogance. “Your daughter is hard to impress,” he told my mother, and then he counted off all the reasons I was wrong about this particular ship. Its Turkish baths, squash courts, and of course the fact that it was gigantic and unsinkable. “God himself could not sink this ship,” he said with a cheerful whistle, and where some people might have thought of hubris, I myself was thinking of the name ‘Titanic’ and men’s obsession with size. I wanted to cause a scene by quoting Freud, but I felt lost in my enormous dress, as if I was drowning in it, the very opposite of unsinkable. It is, I suppose, ironic that the idea of hitting the bottom of an actual ocean was beginning to appeal to me. We all know how Titanic fared, yet I almost managed to sink two days before everyone else. I would have, if not for her.

I felt constantly scrutinized, yet paradoxically no one ever really saw me back in those days. Neither my mother nor my fiancé noticed when I slipped away from the mindless chatter of yet another party. No one cared or pulled me back when I headed for the stern deck of Titanic and climbed the railing. Given the shoes I wore it is a small miracle that I did not slip and disappear into the black water straight away. As it was, I hesitated long enough for someone to call out: “Don’t do it.” Not recognising the voice, I whipped my head around. In the darkness I could make out the contours of a person: lose jacket, the glaring red eye of a cigarette, a young man. “Don’t come any closer,” I warned; “I’ll let go!”

“No, you won’t,” said the stranger with the presumptuousness of all men, and for a second spite replaced my despair: “What do you mean _no I won't_? Don't presume to tell me what I will and will not do.” I expected the usual objections that follow when one is not taken seriously, but none came. Only a quiet statement: “If you jump, I’ll have to jump after you. I’m involved now.” Proving his sincerity, the young man stubbed his cigarette and began to take off his jacket. “The fall alone will kill you,” I quipped back, as if the roles were suddenly reversed, as if I were the one trying to talk someone out of a suicide and not the one hanging off the back of a ship. “I hope so,” he said, unlacing his shoes, “because water that cold hits you like a thousand knives stabbing you all over your body.” He said it as if he knew what he was talking about, as if there was a story there, a dark childhood memory perhaps. “Which is why I’m not looking forward to jumping in after you. But like I said, I don't see a choice.” For the first time I noticed a peculiar timbre in his voice, something I could not quite name, but it piqued my curiosity and sealed my fate: I would not jump after all. You see, curiosity is intrinsically linked with a want to discover, to experience, to live. And so I decided to accept the hand offered to me by a complete stranger. Its grip was firm, but the bones slender. Before I managed to form a question the answer was provided to me along with a name: “Jack Dawson,” said my saviour, and up close I recognised the soft voice for what it was. Jack, hair cut short and dressed in men’s trousers, was very clearly a woman.

To this day I am not sure whether I was truly startled by the revelation, or whether my heels where to blame. In any case, I finally did slip, and how Jack, who was several inches shorter than me, managed to pull me back on the ship in one, albeit dishevelled, piece is something I will never understand. The commotion caught the attention of other passengers and my fiancé, who had eventually noticed my absence. He found us there, one heaving mess on the floorboards, the neckline of my dress askew, Jack partially undressed and on top of me. Clearly misreading the situation, Cal yanked Jack from me and seemed ready to physically fight for my virtue. As Jack gained some semblance of footing and stood straight, however, Cal made the same realisation I had a few minutes prior. And just like that, Cal’s expression changed from that of an aggressive rooster to bloated arrogance. “Oh,” he said, inflating that single syllable with equal parts relief and condescendence, before turning his eyes to me. “I suppose you had an accident?” I looked to Jack, who looked from my fiancé and then back to me with a dawning understanding on her face. It was clear she would never let on what had truly happened, what I had so very nearly done, and so I decided Cal could hear what he wanted to hear: _Fascinating propellers, stupid damsel in distress, women and machinery._ My explanation, incoherent as it was, satisfied him and every other onlooker and with that, Jack and I went from strangers to two people sharing a secret.


	2. II - Leaving Port

The next day I remember thinking how the sunlight felt, as if I hadn't felt the sun in years. I strode along the promenade with purpose. My fiancé had asked Jack to join us for a dinner later. Officially, as a way of thanking her for helping me out of my ‘accident’ the previous night. In reality, to assert his own superior position. Cal’s world depended on contrast. Upper class needed lower classes, not just as workers and servants, but as the means to defining itself. Jack would be so obviously out of place in her worn men’s clothes. The comparison would make Cal and his peers seem like royalty. The fact that he extended his invitation and charity to Jack would make Cal himself seem like gracious royalty. And he probably expected Jack, who also differed from the women of her own class, to provide amusement. Sort of like an exotic middle course. I would have none of it. So I was going to seek out Jack in her steerage quarters to prepare her for what was coming. At least, that is how I explained the visit to myself. However, as I unlatched the gates separating our worlds and figuratively as well as literally descended into a lower class, I knew this explanation was not entirely true. I knew that the one in need of preparation, the one with everything to learn was not Jack. It was I. 

I was as out of place in Jack’s world as she was in mine, yet we spent the entire day moving back and forth between them as if difference did not matter. As if difference could be negotiated, moulded whichever way we wanted it. I am no longer merely talking about class differences. Even at 17 I was not naïve enough to presume that poverty in and of itself was a ticket to freedom. My mother had warned me about it often enough, and although my own social circles were limiting in many ways I would not consider spending every day fighting off starvation any more rewarding. I could tell Jack had experienced hardship. She was strong, but in a sinewy, thin sort of way. She had patches of rough skin on her hands. She had visible scars, probably many more hidden under the loose clothes. But these differences sprang from her life conditions, not her life choices. I did not romanticise the first; I was not as arrogant as Cal. But I was becoming increasingly intrigued by the latter, by her choices.

Jack was an artist. She had travelled, seen things, met people and always, it seemed, with an open mind. Not all paths were paved to her, but she had chosen one on her own. No one else had put her on it. No one else had chosen the clothes she was wearing. Even her name, I suspected, was of her own choosing. I liked the power of it and felt annoyed with my own, floral name. Rose. So delicately feminine, an object with no agency, groomed and shaped by other people. I was quickly realising I wanted to be more like Jack. “You know, my dream has always been to just chuck it all and become an artist.” It was not true. It was not an old dream. It was a new idea, and I was testing it out as I voiced it. Jack laughed, but she was laughing with me, not at me. “You wouldn't last two days. There's no hot water, and hardly ever any caviar,” she said, poking me gently with her elbow. I poked back, oddly happy about this physical banter. “Listen, buster... I hate caviar!” Jack stopped by the railing, but her eyes were watching me, not the ocean. They were crinkled at the corners, even though she was not exactly old. The crinkles seemed to smile kindly at me. “So what kind of artist would you want to be?” I leaned against the railing, basking in this new sort of attention to what I might contain rather than to my composure. “I don't know... Perhaps an actress. In moving pictures.” Her crinkles were broadening. I felt like they encouraged me. “Or a dancer. A wild pagan spirit like Isadora Duncan?” I twirled to prove my point and was about to grab Jack hands and draw her into my impromptu dance. But would she lead, or should I? I was so used to the parts being clearly defined, the script already written and never negotiable. With Jack there was no script, or at least not one I was familiar with. I had to struggle to keep up. “Why can't I be like you Jack?” I was asking myself as much as her, and the question was rhetorical. The answer, of course, was that I _could_ be like Jack – if only I dared. For now we stayed in the realm of hypotheticals. “Say we'll travel together sometime... to a pier in Santa Monica... even if we only ever just talk about it,” I suggested. Jack played along. “Alright, we're going. We'll drink cheap beer and we'll ride horses on the beach... but you have to ride like a cowboy, none of that side-saddle stuff,” she added with a wink. I giggled. “You mean one leg on each side? Scandalous!” I liked the idea of scandalous. And if Jack could ride like a man, then so could I, could I not? I would have to get out of my dress of course, but that was not entirely impossible. “You will have to show me,” I said, “teach me to spit too!” I don’t know why that idea occurred to me all of a sudden – that proper spitting, like proper riding, ought to have nothing to do with gender. “Why should only men be able to spit? It's unfair!” Jack agreed. And, as I expected, she knew exactly how to spit with a proper aim and range. More importantly, she was willing to teach me. Right then and there on that first class deck. It was the freest I had ever felt.

Later in the afternoon she showed me some of her sketches. They were drawn using simple means, paper and pencils, but they seemed to come alive before my eyes. I felt like I could smell Paris, see all of its colours. Touch it even. Get to know the people Jack had known. An old woman in expensive, yet moth-eaten clothes with wrinkled hands. A sleeping child. “They are really good,” I said, annoyed with my inability to put into words how I really felt about the drawings. There was something direct and genuine about her them. The very opposite of the theatrics of my own class. They seemed… intimate, somehow. I turned a page and got to a series of drawings that were intimate in an entirely different sense of the word. They were female nudes, and they made me blush. “Were these drawn from life?” I asked, although I already knew the answer. Jack drew what she saw, what she lived, not what she merely dreamt of. “Yup. That's one of the great things about Paris. Lots of women willing to take their clothes off,” Jack replied, and for a moment I wondered if she was trying to shock me. I decided not to let her, and so as I studied several drawings of one particular, clearly one-legged woman I casually commented. “Oh, so this woman was a prostitute, was she?” I was trying to get a reaction from Jack, and I succeeded, but it was not the reaction I expected. Instead of being impressed by my display of worldliness she seemed hurt by my comment. “No,” she said simply. I wanted to rid the air of the sudden awkwardness between us, so I stated the obvious: “You drew her several times.” Jack hesitated, seemingly weighing some words before deciding on: “She had beautiful hands.” I could tell there was more, something she was not telling me, something I felt I needed to know, so I ploughed on, without really understanding what I was getting at: “You liked her, did you not?” At that Jack looked up at me with an oddly inquisitive gaze. I held it, and she seemed to reach some kind of decision. “Liked her is a bit of an understatement,” she said carefully. “We had a love affair.” The words struck something within me. Something that was already there, something I, in a way, already knew about Jack even if I had no label for what she had just told me. Perhaps that was the very reason I had pushed her. In any case I felt no surprise, merely an odd sense of exhilaration. I had of course heard of women like Jack, women who preferred the companionship of other women to that of men. But I had, at least to my own knowledge, never met any before. They had remained the stuff gossip is made of, vague and exaggerated and entirely unrelatable. Jack, on the other hand, was a real person and, in spite of the glaring differences between our outside appearances, more relatable than any of the people I had arrived on the ship with. I dared not quite think of what this might mean for me yet, in fact even the nudes seemed safe by comparison. “You have a gift, Jack, you see people,” I said as an attempt to steer our conversation back to her concrete drawings. Jack didn’t bite. She kept her eyes trained on me. “I see you,” she said. “And I don’t think you would’ve jumped.” 

I normally detest when people presume to know me better than I know myself, but strangely enough Jack’s conclusion did not make me angry. Instead I felt shame. “Jack… I feel like such an idiot. I know what you must be thinking! Poor little rich girl. What does she know about misery?” I dared not look up. “That’s not at all what I was thinking, Rose.” Her voice held wonder, as if she couldn’t quite fathom what I was suggesting. It made me look up after all. She blinked several times and wet her lips, as if buying time. “What I was thinking…” She shook her head lightly, but the lightness was contradicted by the seriousness of her words. “I was thinking what could have happened to hurt this girl so much she though she had no way out.” Her words hit closer to home than any ever had before. She really did see me in a way I was not used to. “I felt trapped in their world like an insect in amber,” I quietly said, well aware that my explanation was not very specific. I did not have the words to be specific, not at that point. I finally settled for: “I just couldn’t get away from them.” “Would ‘them’ include the penguin from last night?” Jack tried to infuse her question with humour, but her eyes were a more intense blue than normally. They seemed to pierce me, and I felt dismantled before them, so instead of answering with words I held up my hand and with that my engagement ring with the ridiculously oversized diamond. Even the dimensions of the stone hardly explained why it felt so heavy. Again, Jack seemed to at once acknowledge and lighten the heaviness of not just the ring, but the entire situation. “My gawd,” she said in an exaggerated accent, “you would have gone straight to the bottom!” We laughed together, as her finger poked the gem. After a beat she said: “So don’t marry him.” “It’s not that simple,” I automatically responded. I was still giggling, until her finger slipped away from the ring. Less than half an inch, and she was barely grazing my finger, yet all my awareness instantly travelled to my hand. “It really is that simple,” she concluded. And from the small point of contact between our hands a sort of physical realisation spread through my body. Her touch was not even a caress. But perhaps it could be. Perhaps a lot of things I had never thought possible could be.


	3. III - "Take her to sea, Mr. Murdoch"

The dinner that night was as terrible as I had expected it to be. Jack surprised everyone except, perhaps, me when she showed up in a finely pressed suit that she must have borrowed from someone. “Shined up like a new penny,” as an almost pleasant first class passenger noted. Jack’s smile seemed more genuine than overbearing, and I half expected her to bow and kiss the hand of every other woman at the table. She did not, of course. She must have been nervous, but never let it show. She politely held the conversation and even answered the most condescending questions without faltering. “Tell us about the accommodations in steerage, I hear they are quite good on this ship,” my mother demanded, and without missing a beat Jack replied: “The best I’ve seen, ma’m, hardly any rats.” She managed to make people laugh as they toasted to making each day count, a convenient euphemism for muddling along without any form of financial or other security. The first class men and women at the table actually acted as if Jack was one of them. All of this merely increased the sinking feeling in my stomach. “No caviar for me,” I told the waiter. The discrepancy between what I was witnessing and what I knew everyone must have been thinking made me lose my appetite. These were not open-minded people. They were people who felt so superior they could easily, at least for one evening, make someone like Jack their pet-project. Her poverty underlined their affluence, her obvious otherness affirmed their sense of entitlement and position at the centre of the world. It was almost a relief when I heard someone whisper: “What _is_ Hockley hoping to prove by bringing that … _bohemian_ up here?” At least this explicit display of hostility was honest. Cal himself, on the other hand, hid mockery behind pleasantries when he invited Jack to join _the gentlemen_ for a brandy in the smoking room. His disdain almost broke through the surface when Jack declined – “Probably best, it’ll be all business and politics, wouldn’t interest you” – but Cal delivered his jab through a dazzling smile, and I wanted to vomit. Instead I wrote my own sardonic remark on a napkin with the lipstick my mother always made me carry: _To making it count. Meet me at the clock._ I knew my feminine writing would smear on Jack’s hand as I slipped her the note under the table. I wanted it to smear. I was starting to want a lot of things. Jack’s eyes whipped towards me, something akin to surprise on her face, as she accepted the note and my taking the initiative for the evening. Emboldened by this I winked at her, a ridiculously indiscreet move on my part, but one that flew past everyone else and made Jack grin. I felt victorious.

Later that night, for the second time that day and the second time in my life to be honest, I again ventured down to the lower classes. As their cabins where small, people where drawn to the sparsely furnished common areas down there, each of them bringing whatever they could to the party: A fiddle, a tambourine, or simply there own liveliness. Since passing Jack the note I was getting a taste for taking the lead, so I did right then and there by dragging her onto the improvised dance floor. The raucousness of it all made it possible for us to almost blend in. This was not the dancing I knew; ordered according to class, gender, and intricate rules. This was rebellion. At least, it was for me – for everyone else in the room it was normal, and in this respect I suppose I remained an outsider, but in the most liberating way. I kicked my high-heeled shoes to the corner. I took a big gulp of beer from the mug nursed by one of Jack’s artist friends. I even smoked a cheap cigarette, much preferring this to any fancy cigar I might have secretly stolen from Cal. I was of course only scratching the barest surface of steerage life. My enjoyment was based on the lack of familiarity with steerage rules rather than the actual absence of rules. As a visitor, I was allowed this naïveté, even if Jack occasionally shook her head ever so slightly, but mostly indulgently, at me. Years of ballet practice made me the more practiced dancer, but I was also benefitting from my height, which I had hitherto been taught to think of as an unladylike and hence undesirable trait. Now it allowed me to twirl Jack under the dome of my raised arm. I felt strong, even as I performed a few ballet moves. For the first time in my live I was realising that femininity and assertiveness did not have to be a contradiction in terms. I knew I had eyes on me when I went up on point, and I felt empowered when two large men gawked at me with something more akin to respect than desire gleaming in there eyes. Most of all, however, I was enjoying the sensation of being watched by Jack. She, too, treated me as an equal worthy of respect, but I was becoming more and more aware of a need for a different sort of admiration from her in particular. The kind I was happy not to recognize in either of the two men also watching me. The kind I was supposed to encourage in Cal, but truly never wished to see in his eyes again. Men were easy to read for me; I had been taught to hone in on their intentions from an early age. Jack was something else. Most of the time she seemed to look at me the way one would regard a comrade. But occasionally I felt her gaze linger, even if I never caught it, and it scorched me. It was unsettling, but far from uncomfortable. When I dragged her outside I may have used the need for cooling down as a pretext, but in truth I wanted the opposite.

We shared a private moment under the stars. I was slightly inebriated and leaned a little to heavily against her shoulder. Our height difference and my lack of coordination made us tumble and Jack barely managed to grab the railing before we fell. “Sorry, not used to standing for so long – guess I’m a spoiled little brat.” We were both laughing. “Right, but under that you’re the most amazingly astounding girl I’ve ever known.” Jack’s response was too automatic to be mistaken for a joke, and she seemed startled into silence by her own words. I tried to properly make out the lines of her face, to gauge whether she was in fact blushing, but it was too dark.

Nothing more happened that night. Cal’s policeman turned personal assistant, the late hour, and an infuriating gentlewomanliness on Jack’s part put a halt on things. Lit only by the firmament she bade me goodnight with a kiss to my cheek that would have been innocent had I not later, in the privacy of my own bed, caressed the spot with one hand while determinedly dipping the other under my slip. ****  
  



	4. IV - Rose

The freedom I had experienced in steerage and under my own covers seemed a dream the next morning when I was met with the wrath of my mother and fiancé. Cal reminded me that I was to be his property, and as such already belonged to him. Then he broke a few plates and left the mess for a female servant who was not his fiancé, but expected to obey him just the same. My mother reminded me that my father had left us nothing but a legacy of bad debts hidden by a good name. I was to use that name and 17 years of schooling in feminine virtues to assure that she and I could spend the rest of our lives wearing corsets rather than making them. “Of course it’s unfair, we’re women, our choices are never easy,” she told me, as if she actually understood my despair, and perhaps she really did. Behind her I saw a mother and her daughter of about four having tea. The mother was correcting her posture, the small girl’s expression so serious and focused even as she picked up a cookie. Behind them was the door. I desperately wanted Jack to come through it, but of course she would not enter first class area without invitation. The door was, in a sense, one way. It could never serve as Jack’s entrance, not really. But I did not have to be trapped here, I knew that now. The door could provide me with an exit. I decided to take it regardless of the consequences.

I found Jack at the apex of the bow railing at the front of the ship, eyes closed and hair dancing in the wind. I could have easily snuck up on her, but thinking back to out first encounter and my loss of foothold I thought it better not to startle her. “Hello, Jack,” I simply said, and then I took the smile she replied with as an invitation to step closer. She turned back to the ocean, stepped up on the lowest part of the railing so she almost matched my height, and I automatically grasped her waist from behind. I knew she was slim, bony even, but she felt softer than I had anticipated, and I could not help but stroke the top of her hips with my thumbs. I think she let out a gasp, but it could have been the waves below us. For a moment there seemed to be only the two of us on that ship. Or really, just the two of us, period – the ship was behind us, all we could see was the vast horizon. “It’s like flying,” I said, sounding like a bad romance novel, and my comment made Jack turn towards me. To gently tease me, I thought, but then I caught the shimmer in her eyes. It could have been a reflection of the setting sun, it probably was, but to me it seemed also a reflection of everything I had been feeling in the past twenty-four hours. I was sure she wanted to kiss me, right there, in what could still be considered daylight. I was sure she was going to. In spite of the fresh ocean, the only noise I heard was that of my own heart, the only wind I felt the gentle gusts of Jack’s breath on my face. Then the moment was broken. She turned further in my almost-embrace, then twisted free from it entirely as she jumped down from the railing and away from me. I felt rejected. But only until I noticed she was holding out a waiting hand for me. Then I just felt foolish. We were, of course, not the only two people on the ship or even near the bow railing. The idea of her kissing me in front of them might seem romantic, but there would be repercussions. Even if I had not yet experienced homophobia, did not know a word for it, I was sensible enough to accept her hand for what it truly was: The most romantic public display of affection I could realistically hope for from another woman as of 1912. 

Had Jack been a man, then she might have taken me to the parking deck of the ship. She might have dragged me into the backseat of someone’s Renault and had her way with me. It was what I had been warned against, men and their passions. No one had warned me against someone like Jack. No one had warned me against my own passions. We did not fit into any of the terror tales relayed by my mother. We were not a cliché; we were barely conceivable. And so we followed no familiar script. We did not kiss on any porches or in any automobiles. We had to turn to creativity, and fortunately Jack was already an artist. So I took her to Cal’s deserted suite – he would not be back from the smoking room for hours – and asked her to paint me the way she had painted her French lover: In the nude. “The last thing I need is another picture of me looking like a china doll,” I said as I began to slowly remove my clothes, one item at a time. I deliberately emphasised _looking like_ because I wanted Jack to understand I was anything but; that I did neither need nor want to be delicately handled. Jack, however, merely nodded and kept her eyes trained on her pencils, at least to begin with. I had stepped out of my shoes, and my dress pooled around my feet. She was laying her utensils out as if they were surgical tools. I pulled the slip over my head, making sure the silk grazed my bosom on the way. Jack looked the picture of concentration as she opened her sketchbook, placed it on the table in front of her. I began untying my corset, and with every knot undone my breasts grew fuller, my body almost sighing with relief as the constraints gave way. Relief was replaced by longing, however, as I found I wanted every inch of newly exposed skin covered again. Not by the pressure of a corset, but by the pressure of Jack’s hands. They were busy sharpening a particular pencil, her eyes trained on the knife. When I let my knickers drop to the floor her eyes finally strayed. Only for an instance, but it was enough: I knew I was succeeding in seducing her. Emboldened by this I stepped in front of the divan in the centre of the room and casually asked: “How do you want me?” It was a trick question. It forced her to look up from her pencil. I chose that moment to take off the ridiculous necklace gifted to me by Cal, knowing I was more or less pushing my breasts towards Jack as I unlocked the clasp behind my neck. I saw her blush, even as she managed to give me something akin to directions, and I let out a breathy laughter. “I cannot imagine Monsieur Monet blushing,” I added teasingly. “He does landscapes,” she replied, exasperation and something else in her voice. The something else made a warm feeling settle at the pit of my stomach and lower. Mostly lower. I positioned myself on the divan, legs bend and one arm over the backrest as per Jack’s instruction.

For the next quart of an hour her art took over. As she drew me I became aware of my body in a way I had never been before. My nipples hardened as if she were physically touching them with her gaze. With every stroke of her pencil I felt as if I were being stroked. I felt heat at the juncture of my legs and a sort of pressure, as if my own skin could no longer contain me. It was the most erotic moment of my life… up till then at least. And it was not enough. I knew Jack would never push me, even if I wanted her to do exactly that, so I once again had to take the lead. My patience was dwindling, and the moment she put down her pencil I beckoned her over. “Let me see,” I said, and how could she deny me? I moved over, drew my legs up, and patted the space next to me. If Jack noticed the slightly damp spot left there she did not let it show. She sat gingerly, careful to leave at least a few inches of space between any part of me and her as she held up the sketchpad, her hand trembling. I ignored her weak attempt at propriety by leaning against her and letting my right arm trail along hers until we were both holding the sketchpad, both scrutinising it. “You see people. You see me,” I said quietly. With my free hand I reached for her chin. “You don’t have to look away now. I like it when you look at me.” She hesitantly let her face be turned towards me. I thought I saw fear for a second, but it did not stop me from kissing her or her from kissing me back. This time we really could be the only two people on the ship, and I climbed onto her lap, straddled her. She allowed me to take the sketchbook from her hand and place it somewhere behind us, then to place her hand on the swell of my left breast. Unlike me she knew what to do, yet I had to guide her every step of the way. I did not mind, just as long as she did not hold back out of some misguided sense of needing to protect my virtue. I wanted nothing to do with virtue. I wanted to never be able to turn back from this. So I grasped her other hand and kissed each of her fingertips. They were roughened by work, but still the fingers of an artist. I saw her visibly swallow and turned the romantic gesture into an overtly sexual one as I sucked on her index finger. Just the tip. Then I took all of it in my mouth, and Jack finally, finally lost control. A moan erupted from somewhere deep in her chest and her right hand came to live on my breast. It squeezed, stroked, pinched, but I still wanted more. I wanted her to leave a mark on her, to claim me. I wanted to give her what I was supposed to save for the wedding night I so dreaded. So I pulled her finger from my lips, saw the tip glimmer in the light from dimmed lamp, before I guided it lower. She seemed to hesitate, and I would have none of it, so I pressed her hand between my legs. My intention was for her to take me, but really, I was the taker. Her hand was still, so I kissed her reassuringly. “I need you inside me.” I caressed her lip with the words. Then I bit it, and she began to take over. She caressed parts of me that I would only years later learn the names of. All I knew of sex at the time was that I was supposed to be entered, so I was unable to focus on how wonderful what she was doing actually felt. I was only thinking of what was supposed to come, what was supposed to hurt and be irreversible. And eventually she seemed to understand what I wanted from her. She probed gently at first, and I pressed myself eagerly against her even as I was bracing myself for the pain. So she pushed her finger all the way into me.

And nothing happened. The sensation of being touched on the inside was foreign, but nothing tore, nothing bled, nothing hurt in the least. For the briefest of instants I wondered if the penetration of a finger was simply different from that of a man, but I found I already knew the answer: It was all a fabrication, yet another attempt at controlling me and other members of my sex. With the realisation came red-hot rage, and I took it out on Jack’s finger, demanded more, received more. And as she was three fingers deep, as I fucked her there on the divan in my fiancés cabin, my rage was eventually replaced by a devil-may-care sense of freedom. I did not break like a china doll. I could let myself be taken without becoming someone’s property. I could be receptive and in charge at the same time. I myself could take. So I took everything I could from Jack, and I gave her all of it back. Soon trousers and a shirt had joined my feminine clothes on the floor, looking every bit as dishevelled as we did.


	5. V - The Heart Goes On

You already know how the story ended. We talked about starting a life together once the Titanic reached America. I suppose we were high on young love, but we never did get to make good on our promises. The iceberg happened. And then tragedy, propelled by human arrogance and class segregation, happened. Jack and I stayed together for as long as we could, but the water was like a thousand knives, and only one of us came out of the catastrophe alive.

I could have easily been reunited with my mother and fiancé, but it would have felt like a betrayal. Of Jack’s memory, yes, but also, and just as importantly, of myself. Of the identity I had not even found a name for yet. I chose one that seemed to honour it: _Rose Dawson_. And then I continued on the path Jack had helped me get on. Even if I at first did so clumsily and unaware of what it would truly entail, I never questioned that the path was right for me.

Even now, as I am nearing the end of my life, I still do not. Look at the photos on my walls, on my shelves, on the nightstand: There I am, riding a horse the way only men were supposed to back then. And there are all the places I have visited, most of them by plane rather than ship. There is my adoptive daughter playing with her preferred toy, a model railway. There are my many, many lovers.

Not all of them, of course. Jack is missing. I could find no record of her anywhere, which really did not come as a surprise. I do not even have a picture of her. She now exists in my memory – but also in every single choice I have made since I met her. She saved me one night on the back of the Titanic when I thought my future held nothing but despair. After that, she did so much more: She made me save myself.

 


End file.
